The Canadian company behind London's beach volleyball venue

Since 1996, the sand under the feet of Olympic beach volleyball players has been provided by Hutcheson Sand & Mixes in Huntsville, Ontario and here at the beach volleyball venue in Horse Guards Parade at the Olympic Games in London, July 30, 2012.Ed Kaiser
/ Postmedia Olympic Team

Since 1996, the sand under the feet of Olympic beach volleyball players has been provided by Hutcheson Sand & Mixes in Huntsville, Ontario and here at the beach volleyball venue in Horse Guards Parade at the Olympic Games in London, July 30, 2012Ed Kaiser
/ Postmedia Olympic Team

Hutcheson VP of business development Todd Knapton (R) and Roberto Regianni (L), Technical supervisor for the venue. This is their third Olympics together.Handout

Handout photo of the beach facility in early stages of construction. the Horse Guards building is in the background.Handout

LONDON — The United Arab Emirates, it appears from the TV pictures, have quite a lot of sand.

So does Greece, if you can find it in between the cigarette butts discarded by tourists.

Great Britain, for that matter, has hundreds of miles of seaside sand — think St. Andrews, and the Chariots of Fire gang. That vast expanse they’re running on isn’t pavement, it’s the town beach.

But when Dubai needed sand of just the right colour and consistency that would match the dunes, and never compact, to fill the bunkers of a Greg Norman-designed golf course, it sent away for it ... to Huntsville, Ont.

When Athens needed sand for the 2004 Olympics beach volleyball competition, the Hutcheson Sand and Mixes Co. of Huntsville found it, processed it and shipped it ... from Belgium.

By comparison, supplying sand for the London Olympics — 4,400 tons of it, for six practice courts and the main beach volleyball venue at the Horse Guards Parade — was less complicated.

Especially because Bob Clarke, the London Organizing Committee’s volleyball manager, insisted it be from a local quarry. “In line with LOCOG’s sustainability pledges,” he said, “we wanted to source the sand from the U.K.”

That mandate sent Todd Knapton, Hutcheson’s VP of business development, on a scouting mission.

“We pulled out samples from all over the U.K., trying to find an appropriate source, and after a couple of months we did,” he said. The quarry was in Godstone, Surrey. The sand is called Redhill 28.

“Beaches are basically a taboo, environmentally you can’t take sand off a beach,” Knapton said in a phone conversation Monday, “so we went to different quarries. Geographically, we just started narrowing it down, taking the colour as a physical property, the size [of the granules], the shape, angularity ... it’s all washed and sized. There’s a specific gradation set out that we designed for FIVB [International Volleyball Federation].”

Hutcheson’s company first became involved with beach volleyball prior to the Goodwill Games in New York City, when it trucked sand from Huntsville to the Games site in Central Park.

It is now the exclusive contractor for supplying sand to major FIVB events. It previously used native sand only for the 2000 Olympics on Bondi Beach in Sydney, and is under contract to provide the surface for the its fifth Olympics, Rio de Janeiro in 2016.

The venue at Horse Guards, and the practice courts in St. James Park, had the advantage of a spectacular setting amid the iconic landmarks of London.

“It’s like something out of Harry Potter, isn’t it?” Knapton said. “But that was Bob Clarke’s vision. He’s pulled this thing together. It was his dream to have it there. I said Bob, put it on a beach somewhere, Brighton, and he said no, I want it right here. It was quite an undertaking, and I’ve got to go back on the 15th and take it all out.”

Post-Olympics, the sand will be used by Volleyball England for training venues around the U.K.

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